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Yes, a valid point. Perhaps the best thing would be to go back to as it used to be, where perhaps 10% of the population is subsidised to go to university to learn these useful trades while the rest of the population can choose to pay or choose to stay at home as they wish. Some university...

Why is it considered racist to say that "not all cultures are equally valid"? The row about Saudi ownership of Newcastle and golf tournaments, and the row about Qatar being host of the World Cup, is exactly because those cultures were held to be not valid compared with our own. Certainly the...

Agreed. someone who medically qualifies and then works in the NHS should not be paying fees. Something could surely be worked out either to exempt medical training from the fee issue, or for the person to "pay" the fees over time via credit for working in the NHS.

They're basically hobby farms, not commercial farms.

But if the question is put the other way round, is it fair that less intellectual people (those that can't get into university) should be taxed so that the cleverer ones who are ultimately likely to be on higher wages, can have three subsidised years of education?

I don't think Watford zero understands polite queries about numbers. Now, if you swore violently and abusively, you'd be talking his language.

That's because there are two views which to an extent conflict. One is that they don't like rich people and want to tax them as much as possible; the other is that they need rich people because they're the ones paying so much of the tax. The billionaires, the ones with so much money that tax...

The average farm is over 200 acres and the average farmland is about £10,000 per acre. That's just the land value, and there will be farmhouses, barns, machinery and tractors, livestock, and probably goodwill to add to that. Average sized farms will definitely be charged to tax.

Plus VAT, perhaps?

How expensive are those, roughly? And presumably not tax deductible.

For one thing, if you give the farm to your children and they die first, then IHT is chargeable anyway. For another, if you hand over the farm but carry on living and working there, surely it would be a gift with reservation and therefore not covered by the 7 year rule? You would have to...

So why not go after the investors rather than the real farmers?

Being an old man is not a valid excuse for that sort of filth.

There are 400,000 more civil servants now than there were before covid. How is that gutting?

I think perhaps it's not surprising that there are still people who view black people as one homogenous entity who are all expected to think the same . It is perhaps surprising that this particular person is black herself. Apart from anything else, the political stupidity of making a racist...

The problem for farmers is that their return, based on asset value, is tiny. Suppose the farm is 200 acres, notional value say £2m, with a 5% return on asset value . Houses and barns use up the normal IHT allowance so the tax is £200k. Annual profits are £100k less tax ( obviously subject to...

You are of course assuming that we all have at least 7 years' notice of our date of death. Sadly, experience doesn't bear this out. And of course if you are talking about potentially exempt transfers, they would need to be incredibly careful of the "gifts with reservation" exemptions...

There is betting tax on bookmakers, though I don't know how it works nowadays. I suspect the reason it's not taxed as income is because logically that would mean losing bets could be allowed as expenses.

No, that's why I put "good news" in inverted commas. The point was supposed to be that the withdrawal of winter fuel allowance from wealthy pensioners was the real flagship policy of the government, and I emphasised in brackets that the government thinks over £12k per year is wealthy enough to...

I believe that the "good news", which is the reason it has been trailed since election day, is that wealthy pensioners (ie. those with over £12k per year) are losing their winter fuel allowance.